No hope, no change, no refunds

“As Bloomberg News revealed last October, there is an accelerating trend of healthcare providers demanding upfront payments for non-emergency care as insurance deductibles rise. That trend will undoubtedly be exacerbated by ObamaCare, due in large part to a provision in the law that provides enrollees a 90-day grace period of premium nonpayments before their insurance can be cancelled – even as the insurance companies themselves remain liable for payments to providers for only 30 of those 90 days. The remaining 60 days leave the provider on the hook for collecting their fees. …

“Small businesses looking at rate increases may decide to drop coverage altogether, putting another 20-30 million Americans in the same boat as the 5 million Americans who had their policies cancelled because they failed to meet the new requirements. …

“Americans should never forget that all of this is happening even as two other major variables remain unresolved. First, the mechanism for a taxpayer bailout of insurance providers remains in effect. These so-called ‘risk corridors’ allow providers to set their premium prices artificially lower until the end of 2016. After that, without underwriting by the federal government, premiums could skyrocket even higher. Second, the employer mandate affecting mid-sized companies with 50 to 99 full-time employees, and larger companies with 100 employees or more, has been postponed until 2016. It remains to be seen how many more policy cancellations will result when Democrats can no longer kick that politically-charged can past another election cycle.” —Arnold Ahlert, ObamaCare’s Abysmal Numbers

“California Obamacare patients are finding it more affordable to drive to Tijuana, Mexico for health care treatment than to use their high-deductible Obamacare plans.

“The Obama administration has lamented the fact that Latino Obamacare enrollments remain surprisingly low. However, according to USA Today, ‘Mexican immigrants living in California, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico have long sought health care in border cities such as Tijuana, Mexicali and Nogales. The Affordable Care Act won’t change that, experts said.’

“Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the UCLA School of Medicine Director David Hayes-Bautista said high U.S. costs and low access may mean that ‘it’s possible even more U.S. residents may seek care with Mexican doctors.’

“A 2009 study found that half a million Mexican immigrants living in California get their medical care in Mexico because their green cards allow them to travel back and forth across the border easily.

“According to at least one Obamacare paper-pusher, employees at an application-processing center in Wentzville, Missouri are getting paid to sit around and do nothing. Investigative reporter Chris Nagus of the St. Louis television station KMOV News 4 spoke to the whistleblower. ‘They want to hire more people even though we still don’t have work to keep the people that we have busy,’ the worker revealed. ‘There are some weeks that a data entry person would not process an application.’ The worker – or rather, shirker – also spilled the beans on how his colleagues are ‘told to sit at their computers and hit the refresh button every ten minutes.’” —Michelle Malkin, Cash for ObamaCare Shirkers

“Corporatist government-business projects like ObamaCare should be held to far higher standards of accountability and transparency than purely private-sector enterprises, because corporations are ultimately responsible to shareholders, survive only through sustainable business models, and have government regulators breathing down their necks. (And as we saw from the GM recall debacle, when the government becomes senior partner in a corporation, those regulators grow notably less enthusiastic.) There’s no question ObamaCare would be dead and gone if it were a private business; CEO Barack Obama would spend the rest of life in court, or jail, fending off lawsuits from defrauded customers. …

“But instead, we get far less transparency and accountability when Big Government and Big Business get together to unleash their mutant progeny upon the population. We get spokespeople and their willing media enablers lying about how everything is going fine, when it clearly isn’t. The people who preside over unspeakable disasters are allowed to retire gracefully, with thanks for all their hard work. Top officials cite their lack of awareness of critical problems as a defense against being held responsible for failure. And even when the media knows that everything they’ve been instructed to relay to us about ObamaCare was a lie, they grant default credibility to the next set of fairy tales.” —John Hayward, Full Scale of ObamaCare Launch Disaster Is Revealed

“In June 2012, a Supreme Court majority accepted a, shall we say, creative reading of the ACA by Chief Justice John Roberts. The court held that the penalty, which the ACA repeatedly calls a penalty, is really just a tax on the activity — actually, the nonactivity — of not purchasing insurance. The individual mandate is not, the court held, a command but merely the definition of a condition that can be taxed. The tax is mild enough to be semi-voluntary; individuals are free to choose whether or not to commit the inactivity that triggers the tax.

“‘The ‘exaction’ — Roberts’s word — ‘looks,’ he laconically said, ‘like a tax in many respects.’ It is collected by the IRS, and the proceeds go to the Treasury for the general operations of the federal government, not to fund a particular program. This surely makes the ACA a revenue measure.

“Did it, however, originate in the House? Of course not. In October 2009, the House passed a bill that would have modified a tax credit for members of the armed forces and some other federal employees who were first-time home buyers — a bill that had nothing to do with health care. Two months later the Senate ‘amended’ this bill by obliterating it. The Senate renamed it and completely erased its contents, replacing them with the ACA’s contents.

“Case law establishes that for a Senate action to qualify as a genuine ‘amendment’ to a House-passed revenue bill, it must be ‘germane to the subject matter of the [House] bill.’ The Senate’s shell game — gutting and replacing the House bill — created the ACA from scratch. The ACA obviously flunks the germaneness test, without which the House’s constitutional power of originating revenue bills would be nullified.” —George Will, ObamaCare’s Doom

“Liberals claim the law is ‘working.’ This omits the dozens of provisions that the president has suspended or delayed because they were not working—for budgetary or political reasons. The suspended or postponed provisions include the mandate that businesses cover full-time employees, the cancellation of noncompliant plans, and cuts to Medicare Advantage.

“In fact, what is working is a very narrow segment of the law, the most politically salable part: the distribution of tax credits so people with low incomes can buy heavily subsidized insurance coverage. To say the law is working is like saying you ate your dinner when you gulped down your dessert and skipped the veggies. Just as your mother said you could not have one without the other, so the popular provisions of Obamacare are linked to the unpopular ones. Sooner or later, the administration will have to enforce the law—or watch a vast array of unintended side effects disrupt the national health care system.

“The left assures us Obamacare cannot be repealed. This is particularly rich, considering all the provisions the administration itself has effectively repealed when it found them inconvenient. …

“The funny thing is that, for all the myth-making about Obamacare, the left still cannot sell it to the American public. Even after a month of glowing coverage, polls from the major media outlets show that support for the law is basically flat, stuck in the low 40s, well below the level of opposition.” —Jay Cost, ObamaCare Myth-Making